It’s Time To Abandon Our Infallible Image Of Churchill

Take a moment to read the following quotes. One belongs to Winston
Churchill, the man who is so often lauded as the greatest Prime Minister to
ever have graced the United Kingdom; one belongs to Adolf Hitler, the most
immoral man to have ever lived. The first: “I do not admit that a wrong has
been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade
race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their
place”, and the second: “we demand the fulfilment of the just claims of
the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us,
state and race are one.” The similarity of these racist and eugenics-supporting
quotes, from two men purported to lie on the opposite ends of the spectrum
between good and evil, should be cause for concern, and certainly allow a
justified reassessment of Churchill as a two-time Prime Minister.

Yet criticising Churchill is anathema in British society. Those who
dare to do so are branded as being “ignorant of history”, a label slapped on
Labour candidate Benjamin Whittingham by Churchill’s own grandson, Conservative
MP Nicholas Soames. Labour was forced to distance itself from the statement:
Whittingham was accused of committing electoral suicide. Where has this
infallible image of Churchill come from?

The short answer is Churchill himself. In
assessing Churchill, the biggest problem historians face is the origins of
existing work. Churchill’s
own axiom that “history is written by the victor” should make us incredibly suspicious.
Yet biographies and histories take his word as gospel, not least because the
most detailed of which (over five volumes) were written by Randolph Churchill:
Winston’s only son. If ever an agenda were clearer, I have yet to see it.
Churchill’s blatant penchant for historical revisionism is something associated
more with Stalin’s Russia than Winston’s Britain, yet we find both leaders
guilty of writing histories favourable to their own deeds, dominating
historical orthodoxy for decades. In the Western World, we baulk at Stalin’s
continued popularity in Russia (coming top in a poll to determine history’s
greatest Russian in 2017), and yet we fail to see our own hypocrisy when we
laud Churchill despite damning transgressions.

For the old “product of his time” defence doesn’t even stand up.
Churchill’s racism made him an extremist prior to the war; Leo Amery, Secretary
of State for India and Burma, concluded privately that Churchill was “not quite sane” when it came to the
Bengal Famine, a wartime starvation that killed over 2 million Indians. When
desperately requested for more supplies, Churchill quipped “if food is scarce,
why isn’t Gandhi dead yet?”. Such statements are callousness personified.

Some might critique my point by arguing that a British Prime Minister
should cater to the British first: if so, they fail to see the irony that it
was Churchill who was most vehemently pushing for the maintenance of British
control in India. To this end, he should have been as committed to stopping the
Bengal famine. Instead, Churchill’s proponents cannot deny that this was racist
subjugation: we should recognise this as part of his legacy, rather than simply
downplay two million deaths as a ‘character flaw’. Nor should we tiptoe around
the fact that Britain’s favourite leader was a eugenics fanatic, a lovely
branch of pseudoscience that advocates selective breeding in order to achieve
the perfect race.

Yet Churchill’s revisionism makes us forget this fact. His political
isolation in the 1930s is attributed to his opposition to appeasement, making
him seem, to the British public, an individual hero is a sea of cowards. The
far less palatable issue of Indian Home Rule is downplayed, which would far
more accurately show Winston as an reactionary lunatic swimming against the sea
of progress.

Churchill should be lauded as the lesser of two evils during the Second World War. Yet, when the greater of those evils is the greatest evil to ever live, the bar isn’t exactly high. In any other contest, we see Churchill for who he really was, but his contemporaries make him look good. Churchill’s racism leads to the death of two million Indians? Well, Hitler’s led to the death of six million Jews. Churchill killed 25,000 people in the bombing of Dresden, a target that warranted no military gain? Well, Truman killed 226,000 by dropping two nukes on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Churchill has been lucky to get away with his crimes. It’s time for the luck to run out.A